Ex-Air Force, Marine Pilots Accused of Helping China Reveal Broader Trend

Federal prosecutors accuse them of illegally helping train
China's military, exposing a growing security & treason concern. 
June 27 2026

In this Nov. 9, 2017, file photo, an American flag is flown next to the Chinese national emblem during a welcome ceremony for visiting the U.S.

When federal agents arrested retired Air Force Major Gerald Eddie Brown Jr. in Indiana in February 2026, prosecutors described him as exactly the kind of military aviator foreign governments would want to recruit: a former fighter pilot instructor and veteran of some of America's most advanced military aviation programs.

Brown agreed to use that expertise to train pilots in China’s military without the authorization required by U.S. law, according to federal prosecutors. His arrest came as another former American military pilot, Daniel Edmund Duggan, continued fighting extradition from Australia on similar allegations. Together, the cases have become some of the most prominent examples of what U.S. officials describe as a broader effort by China to recruit former Western military personnel and use their experience to strengthen the People’s Liberation Army.

It reflects a broader pattern of China infiltrating different aspects of the U.S. military and government. Eileen Wang, the former mayor of the Arcadia City Council in California, pleaded guilty to being a Chinese foreign agent who pushed propaganda directly from her pulpit as the head of the municipality. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

In April, the Department of Justice announced that Tianrui Liang, 21, of China, was charged with conduct related to allegedly illegally documenting Air Force planes located at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Neb.

Brown's Post-Military Career Raised Eyebrows

Brown spent more than 24 years in the Air Force and retired with the rank of major, according to court filings.

During that time, he flew combat missions during Operation Desert Storm, commanded units responsible for nuclear weapons delivery systems, served as a fighter pilot instructor, and held security clearances that reached the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level.

His military career included flying the F-4 Phantom II, F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-111 Aardvark, A-10 Thunderbolt II, and AT-38 trainer aircraft. Personnel records cited by prosecutors describe him as a squadron “Top Gun” pilot and a leader in multiple combat and operational assignments.

After leaving active duty, Brown spent years in civilian aviation. He flew cargo aircraft for UPS and traveled to China more than 30 times while working in that role. He was terminated from said role in 2017 after it was determined he caused a physical altercation in the cockpit of a UPS aircraft during a flight.

A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II flies a routine mission over the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility Jan. 9, 2025. The A-10 Thunderbolt II has excellent maneuverability at low air speeds and altitude, and is a highly accurate and survivable weapons-delivery platform.

Due to that altercation, his FAA pilot’s license was revoked in 2018. He briefly worked as a simulator instructor for a cargo company in Florida in 2019-20. Brown also worked with defense contractors supporting U.S. military training programs.

Prosecutors said Brown trained American pilots on the A-10 and F-16 in South Korea. He lost that position in 2022, however, after being accused of creating a hostile work environment and sexual harassment of trainees.

He later worked for Lockheed Martin as an F-35 simulator instructor before losing that position in 2023 after being unable to obtain the required security clearance due to his previous work-related incidents.

The Alleged Recruitment

Federal investigators allege that Brown’s path to China began in 2023 through a former Ecuadorian Air Force pilot already working as an instructor in China.

According to messages cited in the affidavit, the recruiter told Brown that Chinese military aviation programs were looking for experienced fighter pilots. Brown allegedly responded enthusiastically. When told that fighter pilots were needed, prosecutors said he replied, “I'm in!”

According to investigators, Brown submitted a résumé titled “Instructor Fighter Pilot” and listed his objective as “Tactical Aviation Employment.” The résumé highlighted his decades of military aviation experience and thousands of hours in fighter aircraft.

Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, Calif. and  friend of.Gavin Newsome, at right, exits federal court after pleading guilty on charges of acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government on Friday, May 29, 2026, in Los Angeles. 

Prosecutors allege that Chinese recruiters quickly expressed interest and discussed placing Brown at what participants described as the Chinese equivalent of the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, one of the Air Force's premier tactical training institutions.

The affidavit also contains messages that prosecutors say show Brown understood the sensitivity of the arrangement. In one exchange, Brown allegedly stated, "I think we better keep this quiet." In another, he allegedly asked others not to tell people he was coming to China.

Prosecutors also cite messages in which Brown stressed keeping the arrangement off social media and discussed secure methods of communication.

Brown ultimately accepted an offer and traveled to China in December 2023, according to the affidavit. Prosecutors allege he later spent hours answering questions about the U.S. Air Force and provided presentations to members of the People's Liberation Army Air Force.

hey further allege that he remained in China until returning to the United States in early 2026.

The Duggan Connection

The Brown case is not the first time federal prosecutors have accused a former American military pilot of helping train Chinese military personnel.

Daniel Edmund Duggan spent years flying military aircraft as a Marine Corps aviator before relocating to Australia in 2002. He later renounced his U.S. citizenship and became an Australian citizen in 2012.

Prosecutors allege that between 2010 and 2012, Duggan worked through the Test Flying Academy of South Africa, commonly known as TFASA, to provide military flight training to Chinese military personnel.

According to the indictment, Duggan allegedly trained Chinese military pilots in tactics, techniques and procedures associated with aircraft-carrier operations. Carrier aviation is one of the most technically demanding disciplines in military aviation and has long been viewed as a strategic priority for China's military modernization efforts.

In this undated photo provided by Saffrine Duggan, her husband Daniel Duggan poses for a photo
at an unknown location in Australia.

The connection between the two cases runs deeper than the allegations themselves.

Brown's affidavit identifies Chinese national Stephen Su Bin as a key figure in the recruitment effort. Su Bin previously pleaded guilty in the United States to participating in a conspiracy to hack major U.S. defense contractors and steal military-related information for China. The affidavit further states that Su Bin had prior ties to TFASA and had previously worked with Duggan.

Prosecutors cite messages showing that participants in Brown's alleged recruitment effort were discussing Duggan's indictment while evaluating their own legal exposure. One individual allegedly sent another a copy of Duggan's indictment and commented that it "spells it out clearly" regarding the legal risks associated with training Chinese military pilots.

Australian authorities arrested Duggan in October 2022 at the request of the United States. Since then, he has fought extradition through Australia's court system while maintaining his innocence.

In April 2026, however, Duggan suffered a major setback when an Australian federal judge rejected his latest appeal challenging the extradition process. Although additional legal options remain available, the ruling moved him significantly closer to being transferred to the United States to stand trial.

Military Expertise as a Strategic Asset

Neither Brown nor Duggan is accused of stealing classified documents or engaging in traditional espionage. Instead, prosecutors argue that military expertise itself can be a controlled export.

Under the Arms Export Control Act and related regulations, military training and defense services generally require authorization before they can be provided to foreign governments or foreign military organizations.

Federal officials argue that experienced military aviators possess decades of knowledge about tactics, techniques, operational planning and combat aviation that took enormous amounts of time and money to develop. The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom have jointly warned that China's military continued targeting current and former military personnel from NATO countries and other Western nations to strengthen the capabilities of the People's Liberation Army.[PLA]

Both men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. The cases have become a focal point in a broader struggle over whether military expertise can be treated as a strategic asset long after a service member leaves uniform.

 

Chinese Condo Developer Tied to New York's Sprawling Beijing Influence Cases Is Charged in Migrant-Shelter Bribery Scheme

Charged alongside a former Adams chief of staff in a bribery scheme, Andy Zhu also appears in a government exhibit beside Linda Sun and donated to the association behind CCP Police Station.
 June 26 2026 

This prosecution exhibit shows Andy Zhu, center, with the Carone brothers at a party at Zhu’s Long Island mansion, with a number of unidentified men and women.

BROOKLYN — Yan Po Zhu, a Long Island real estate developer who stood beside Linda Sun, the former aide to Governor Kathy Hochul now facing retrial on charges that she served as a covert agent of the Chinese government, at a 2019 New York demonstration against the visit of Taiwan’s president, and who also donated to the Fujianese association whose offices housed the Chinatown police station run for Beijing by the now-convicted Lu Jianwang, has been indicted in a sensational bribery scheme that prosecutors say monetized New York City’s emergency migrant-shelter program through a former senior aide to Mayor Eric Adams, with the payoffs laundered through a pair of law firms.

The developer, also known as Andy Zhu, is charged alongside Frank Carone, the power broker who ran City Hall as Adams’s chief of staff. Carone, prosecutors allege, accepted roughly $120,000 to steer a lucrative shelter contract toward Zhu’s hotel over the repeated objections of the city’s own social-services professionals, who warned that New York already had too many migrant-shelter hotels concentrated in Long Island City.

The hotel ultimately collected $6,825,000. All four defendants—Zhu, Carone, Carone’s brother Anthony, and Zhu’s business manager Crystal Chen—have pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent. Eric Adams himself is not accused of wrongdoing.

Andy Zhu is no marginal condo salesman.

His company’s own description credits him with leading more than five million square feet of development across commercial, warehouse, mixed-use and residential projects, with completed work valued at over $3 billion—a portfolio that straddles the United States and China.

In Queens, the center of his holdings, his work has run to large residential projects: in the mid-2010s, through Triple Star Realty, he was tied to the Assi Plaza site in Flushing, where plans called for a fifteen-story mixed-use building with 265 condominium units. It is wealth on a scale, built on China-to-US investment flows, that placed Zhu among the donors and dinner companions of New York’s political class—his company’s website features him smiling beside four United States presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and George W. Bush.

The Bureau’s reporting, alongside this week’s coverage in the New York Times and the New York Post, has traced a dense tangle of connections running from Zhu into Chinese state-linked financing and into the diaspora networks surrounding both Linda Sun and Harry Lu—community associations now drawing scrutiny from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has pressed federal agencies over concerns that their tax-exempt status is being exploited in ways that could enable election interference, a concern the committee grounded in a Times investigation.

And Zhu’s real estate wealth carries Chinese state ties, The Bureau has confirmed. The data service PincusCo lists his Long Island City condo holdings as financed in part by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned Chinese bank, including a roughly $13 million loan in March 2020 and an $11.4 million loan in December 2025.

On its face the case is a New York story as old as Tammany: money moving through brokers to bend a public decision. Zhu is charged in neither Sun’s nor Lu’s influence case, but his documented ties run into both—including, in the Sun prosecution, his presence at what amounts to one of the most overt acts the government has illustrated in photographic and video evidence, the 2019 protest against Taiwan’s president.

Just as prosecutors allege that Sun and her husband exploited the Covid-19 emergency to steer lucrative pandemic-supply contracts to favored Chinese vendors, the case against Zhu and the Carone brothers turns on the monetization of another crisis of that era—the migrant influx that overwhelmed New York City’s shelter system. Zhu’s hotel, the Microtel in Long Island City, had been rejected by the Department of Social Services as too small and too clustered among shelters the neighborhood was already resisting.

So Zhu, prosecutors say, leaned on a growing personal friendship with Carone, socializing at his Nassau County mansion and texting him the hotel’s address directly. “Thank you my big guy,” Zhu wrote in September 2022.

Within days the directive to reconsider the Microtel was moving down through the agency. By October a city official told staff the hotel had “come directly from the top . . . I know it is in Long Island City, but we should assume it is approved.” Career staff warned it would house fewer migrants in a crisis and force the city to open still more sites. The contract went through anyway.

What the money meant to the people moving it shows in a set of messages, originally in Mandarin and translated by the government, between Chen and an employee who wired the payments.

“The boss completely trusts the two brothers,” Chen wrote of Frank and Anthony Carone, through whose dormant law-firm account the bribes were funneled as sham legal fees. Asked whether it all came down to handing over the money, she answered: “In the end, it’s all about money and giving the two brothers a way out.” In the same thread the wiring employee spoke of leverage—that the payments had bought a hold that could be used again.

New York political access did not come from nowhere. Zhu is a prolific donor across the American political spectrum.